11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Great expectations, substantial problems, August 21, 2002
This review is from: Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, and Literary Appropriations (Paperback)
A few years back, I attended a seminar on Indigenous Nations Studies. One day, one of the students, who 'looked' much like me, and had often expressed his commitment to contemporary social theory, announced that he fantasized about the day when the 'colonizer' would sail back across the Atlantic. In response, several other students, who 'looked' Native American and expressed a commitment to particular tribes, and generally expressed no interest for social theory, asked 'I'm half white; should half of me stay here and the other half leave?'
This anecdote highlights, for me, the sort of difficulties one may encounter in Native American studies (especially as a non-Native scholar in these identity-conscious times). There are obvious tensions: between academic and more practical concerns; between tribal identities, a general 'Native American' identity, and hybrid identities. And there is the matter of just when and how any of these issues should be considered.
Such difficulties are found in Native American Representations. After reading the introduction to the book, and the introductions to several chapters, I had high hopes for the book; but after reading the work with more focus, I was disappointed with the book's shortcomings. This is not to say that it lacks successes. On the contrary, it does address a lack of theoretically informed scholarship on Native American literature; including popularly and scholarly media, film, and even Native American views of Euro-Americans. It considers as well different cultural perspectives on language, property, and landscape, attempting to work beyond the assumptions of a generally 'Western' audience, and strives to include Native American voices in the both the dominant literary and theoretical canons. Such aims, in fact, define the 'ethics' of the book.
Representation is the core concern. As the editor, puts it in her afterword, the ultimate aim is 're-presentation', rather than simple textual 'representation'. Re-presentation requires a deep understanding of self and Other. This is all for a rather simple (still complex) reason: 'For American Indian people, stories can cure or kill.' What this means, for this reader at least, is that language, what words are used by whom and in what manner, should be the focus of an ethics of criticism.
Unfortunately, I think, the reason the book fails in several important respects owes much to this explicit ethical concern. Basically, the ethical demands made by the contributors (generally upon others; less often upon themselves) can't be met within the text. It is a significant question whether any written text can capture the nuances of cultural traditions that are largely oral and performative, that draw so heavily on place-based experiences. Such a question, however, does not often come up in this book. What I perceive, then, as failures and shortcomings in the book are really instances in which theory (as ethics) and practice do not match.
A few examples should suffice to indicate the sources of my discontent. The book opens with two chapters by 'Native American authors', both of whom note the breach between concerns of academics and Indians living on reservations (where the pressing issues are not representation and hegemony, but health care, education, drug abuse). Yet for that these chapters are concerned principally with academic interests. One of these contributors, further, begins by highlighting the lack of Native American voices in contemporary theory (both in its production and within key texts, e.g., Bhabha's The Location of Culture), and yet rarely gets beyond such theory himself. He even criticizes N. Scott Momaday, saying that 'an aboriginal writer has finally learned to write like the colonial center that determines legitimate discourse', but without turning such a critical eye on his own position in that very same center (and within that same legitimizing discourse).
Another contributor displays a remarkable lack of historical-geographical sensitivity in his elision of historically, geographically, and culturally specific practices (the Ghost Dance) and symbols (the buffalo) into a generalized 'Native American' identity. While, he claims, that within the American e pluribus unum, there is no 'space' for Native Americans, one can easily draw on his own arguments to suggest that within such a general signifier as 'Native American', as it is used in this text, there is no 'space' for Dine, Cherokee, Lakota. In fact, in several of the essays, there seems to be an implicit assumption that 'Native American' and 'Euro-American' can be neatly distinguished. This is not necessarily a bad thing; one of the familiar ethical commitments in the text is to maintaining a distinct and viable Native American identity. To insist, however, on an 'innate Indian consciousness' or 'inherent difference between Indians and Europeans' is (as William Apess, an important figure in Native American letters noted) 'a crucial step in denying Indians' political status'. And, even more simply, to operationalize such general categories as 'American' undermines the early invocation of Said and his warning against seeing the 'other' as only a creation of 'our own culture'.
But this is not, to reiterate, to suggest that the entire book is flawed (although some of these flaws I noted seem pretty significant, considering the explicit aims of the text). There are good and interesting chapters on Native American views of whites, filmic (movie and television) representations of Native Americans, and the structure (and demands) made by Native American oral narratives. This latter chapter I found especially interesting. In addition to highlighting the profound difficulty of capturing in a written text all that transpires in an oral narrative, the author pays close attention to the role of place and landscape in Native American cultural traditions, and recognizes that in 'opting to see Native American personal narrators as powerless victims...we simply perpetuate the colonial process' (an insight that seems lost on several other contributors).
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A most engaging, informative, deliberative analysis, January 13, 2002
This review is from: Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, and Literary Appropriations (Paperback)
Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, And Literary Appropriations is an impressive compilation of eleven scholarly essays providing students of Native American studies with a thorough examination of a wide range of representations and misrepresentations of Native Americans throughout history. From Columbus' journal entries referring to "Indios" to cigar box caricatures, to the image of Sacagawea on the dollar coin, five centuries worth of depictions and their meanings are scrutinized. ... Native American Representations is a most engaging, informative, deliberative analysis, and strongly recommended for anyone with an interest studying changing perspectives and representations of Native Americans in the dominate American & European cultures.
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